If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Development Pace Of X.Org Is On The Decline

02-06-2013, 10:40 AM

Phoronix: Development Pace Of X.Org Is On The Decline

Donnie Berkholz presented at FOSDEM 2013 with various X.Org statistics and a look at the health of the development community. Not counting just the X.Org Server but also related components within the X.Org umbrella, the pace of development appears to be on the decline...

Comment

X.Org is old and high maintainance. I suppose most are waiting for alternatives like Wayland. There is no need to provide much work for such a project that will become irrelevant after a while...

Wayland is not trying to be a new Xorg-Server, it just is an alternative in user-space. There may be efforts some day to make a cleaner kernel-space-X-environment (which I would love to see, as currently things like keyboards and mice are redundantly set up), but Wayland isn't it.

Those are areas which could account for devs who migrated away from "just" xserver.

My picks are:

1) Android. Tons of GPU drivers that somebody need to write. And since those usually are closed source, devs will not be able to join X.org community.
2) Android/Linux app development. X.org is one among many FLOSS projects that want to have new devs. Joining others is easier.

Comment

Wayland is not trying to be a new Xorg-Server, it just is an alternative in user-space. There may be efforts some day to make a cleaner kernel-space-X-environment (which I would love to see, as currently things like keyboards and mice are redundantly set up), but Wayland isn't it.

I hope not. Shoveling everything into kernel is not the solution to provide singleton services. There is no reason to run every componenet at PL0 and unrestricted memory access, I hope we'll see drivers and their respective stacks executed with lower privileges and in their separate adress space in the future.

Comment

I think it's time to release x12 and just start cleaning it out. I'm sure a 25 year old project like this is full of useless code. It seems like X has been cleaned up a bit the past year but I'm thinking clean it up to the point where its 40% smaller. the reason i say go for x12 is because there NEEDS to be broken compatibility. I feel like one of the things that holds back X is how it keeps trying to remain compatible with hardware nobody uses and hasn't used for years.

Comment

This is excellent news, and I don't mean this sarcastically but forward looking!

The X devs are probably the ones with the deepest, most intimate knowledge of X and they are -INVALUABLE- in building the bridge to the future called X on Wayland (XWayland?) and eventually Wayland-only, once the most popular apps are migrated/rewritten to Wayland via cool toolkits like Qt, GTK, etc.

I love X, have used it since 1993 on IBM AIX stations back in the days of Mosaic on X... but its time has come and passed, reasserted by the awkward way it's been developed in the last several years where for the sake of performance, the X server has been bypassed in any worthwhile attempt.

People go off spouting things like, well Wayland's just a redo of X - yeah? And OS X was "just a redo of OS 9", or in other words, repayment for all technical debt incurred by a platform that died (whether because of Jobs' departure or not, is debatable), and look what OS X did for Apple? Propelled them to the top of the heap and made them the world's MVP.

X is currently best labelled as technical debt, which will be repaid by creating a "new X" (I hate to use that analogy, but it serves the purpose) which is all that X wasn't and then some....

I implore the X devs to communicate, swallow their egos and unite - all for the purpose of setting the world free - by giving it the next best thing since Linux - Wayland on Linux along with the avalanche of WMs and apps that are soon to follow, all the while not abandoning X-based apps! I still want my 'xeyes' .

Comment

I do not understand why people think seem to think that open source projects' health is determined by development activity. At some point, everything that needs to be done has been done and there is no point to making further changes. Can anyone who thinks that changes should be made indefinitely name what those changes should accomplish?